Use LinkedIn Groups To Double Your Website Traffic

One fast and easy way to get more visitors to your website is to use LinkedIn Groups.

Here is a step-by-step process for using LinkedIn Groups.

Step 1 – Do a quick search by keyword in the upper right of any LinkedIn page for the groups whose members include your audience. There are over 300 million users on LinkedIn (update October 2014) and almost 1.5 million different groups. Some of these groups have thousands of members. Chances are there’s the perfect group for your audience.

For example, if you’re a food and nutrition expert, you’ll want to search for the keywords food and nutrition.

Many of the groups allow anyone to join. Some groups will require you to request membership. Either way, start by selecting two or three groups that have your audience as members and join.

Advanced tip:  You can join a maximum of 50 groups…this gives your expertise and business amazing visibility!

Step 2 – Introduce yourself to the group and monitor the conversations for a few days. All groups have an automated setting that will email you any conversational posts so you don’t have to visit the site everyday. Once you get a sense of the conversations happening within these groups, you can start to plan your own participation.

Advanced tip:  Leverage your time by using a dedicated email like gmail, yahoo or hotmail and check it daily for group updates.

Advanced tip 2:  Review popular posts to verify that they link back to the member’s website. If not, you might want to choose to participate in another group that is more open to member marketing. Otherwise, evaluate the quality of group interaction relative to your visibility goals.

Step 3 – Use your blog posts and other content that relate to group topics.  It should be educational and not promotional. The goal is to share information that helps group members deal with an issue they are asking about.

If you don’t have your own content yet, this is the perfect opportunity to create it. Original content is much more effective at positioning than recycled or repurposed content you found on the web. Group members appreciate original content and it helps you be seen as an expert and thought leader in your field.

Step 4 – Get involved in the conversation and post your content as a way to help other members. Depending on the group ecosystem (see step 2), link your content back to your website.

For example, you don’t have to copy and paste an entire white paper, just offer a summary of the content in the group and provide a link back to your website. That way, when you offer readers relevant information, they are on your website where they can also find the related product or service solutions you offer.

Advanced Tip:  Use tools that allow you to post to multiple groups.

Step 5 – Create a landing page on your site, designed specifically for this group and this content. By creating a custom landing page to measure the effectiveness of your effort, you’ll know how many visitors, how many downloads, how many leads and how many sales opportunities came from this specific marketing tactic. This tracking is critical to future success.

Step 6 – In order for the measurements in step 5 above to have real meaning, you have to benchmark the performance of your website before and after the post. So before you start posting, make sure you know the average number of visitors your website gets on a weekly basis.

Step 7 – Now that you have the groups identified, the content developed and the landing page created, you’re ready to go. Get into the group and post your content. Let it run for a week or so and track the results.

How do you know if this is working? First, you have to know the total number of members in each of the groups you post to. This is easy to find out. Each group shows you the total number of members. Multiply that number by 1% and this should be your expectations of the number of new visitors headed to your website.

If you post to three groups and each group has 10,000 members, then you should expect to get 300 new visitors to your site every time you post. Do this weekly and you would be looking at an increase in site traffic of 1,200 visitors. If your site only gets 1,000 visitors a month, you just doubled your traffic in 30 days with this one simple tactic.

Start Today Tip – It really couldn’t be easier. Follow the seven steps outlined here and you’ll see an increase in website traffic. If you have compelling content and the right call to action on your website you should see more leads from your site in just 30 days.

Advanced Tip: Start your own group and use the welcome template and weekly announcement features to drive even more traffic to your website!

Question:  How do you use LinkedIn Groups? What else would you like me to write about for you? Please let me know in the comments below.

==========

Marketing mentor Christine Hueber teaches business owners and entrepreneurs around the world how to create and manage profitable LinkedIn marketing that easily gets them more clients. Click here for her FREE report “Top 10 LinkedIn Success Secrets for Entrepreneurs.”

Adapted from: http://blog.eonetwork.org